Definition of Free License

The phenomenon of free software does not remain only in a revolution technology, but also seeks to revolutionize society by providing a tool for unrestricted use that also promotes investigation: free software.

And, in the world in which we live, this free software must be legally covered to prevent someone from appropriating it, and to force those who use it to comply with its rules. That is why such coverage is provided through a license.

A license (whether it is free or not) constitutes a legal contract between whoever produces and / or distributes the software, and the user, which must be accepted in the moment of installation and / or first execution of the application and that legally obliges compliance with its terms from the moment of its acceptance.

Being a binding contract between the parties, its breach is considered an offense punishable by law, so that the user can be brought to trial in the event of being discovered infringing it.

Thus, for example, the licenses of

proprietary software explicitly prohibit the copying and free transfer of the program to third parties by the user, as well as the installation and use of copies other than the originals sold by the producing company and / or distributor.

Free licenses are those that comply with the four postulates of software freedom established by Richard Stallman in the mid-eighties.

These postulates are:

Freedom 0: of use, to be able to use the software in any way and with the objective that occurs to us.
Freedom 1: to study how the program works. This implicitly requires the availability of the code fountain.
Freedom 2: distribution, to be able to get the program to whoever we want.
Freedom 3: modification, so that if we want to make a variant of the software, or modify its form of functioning, we can do it. Again it implies the availability of the source code.

As we can see, at no point does it imply the free software explicitly (implicitly we could discuss it), but the availability of its source code and the power to give it to whoever we want.

Free licenses must comply with these four freedoms without palliative or, otherwise and although can comply with any of them, if they do not comply all of them cannot be considered free licenses.

But it is not just about fulfilling these four freedoms; those drafted differ between the different free licenses, in addition to touching on other diverse aspects as well. If not, there would no longer be different free licenses.

Among the most popular and widely used licenses in the world of free software is the GPL.

This was created by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1989, and has undergone various modifications over the years, the latest being in 2007 (version 3).

Initially created for the operating system GNU (a project also started by Stallman), has been extended to a large number of applications, such as the Linux kernel or the LibreOffice office suite. The latter combines the GPL with other free-type licenses.

In addition to the GPL, other important free licenses are Apache (from the homonymous web server), the MPL (Mozilla Public License), the LGPL from the FSF to allow the integration of free software in proprietary software, the Yahoo! Public License, or the CDDL.

The philosophy of free software has ended up permeating the rest of society and, with it, free licenses have spread.

As an example of this we have the audiovisual content, which can also be free, or the content of text.

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